Re: GnatBench (from GPL edition)

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk>]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:07:30 -0400, Stephen Leake
<Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote:

>John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk.nospam> writes:
>
>I've been tempted to switch to Eclipse from Emacs, mostly because Java
>is better for writing structured code than Lisp; I'm getting tired of
>fighting obscure Lisp code in Emacs.

Oh no - surely not!!! Don't do it Stephe, who'll look after ada-mode
:-)

>(Yes, I know that means I should go all the way and switch to GPS. But
>Eclipse has far more capability than GPS; it's much closer to Emacs).

Personally I'd avoid GPS. I've only had a little play with it, but two
things about GPS would put me off...

1) It's phenomenally ugly, at least on Windows where the GTK widgets
it uses just don't (in my opinion) look right. Perhaps GPS Pro is
better?

2) Who uses it outside the Ada world? Can you get full support for
Python, Perl, PHP, Ant, Java plug-ins for it, what about ? Are you
ever likely to?

3) As AdaCore have developed Gnatbench (although I can't get it to
work sensibly :-) you have to wonder whether this could be the
beginning of the end for GPS. In addition the ADT (Hibachi)
development is also supported by AdaCore along with a multitude of
other Ada vendors.

http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20071105_hibachi.php

4) It's got a silly acronym/abbreviation, it's too much like GPS
(Global Positioning System)!

(well, 4 things I guess :-)

Eclipse not only looks better, as they've used the SWT widgets, it's
more widely supported.

GPS clearly has many useful features, but there doesn't seem to be
much (that I know of) that couldn't be implemented in Eclipse.

With all due respect to AdaCore, I do wonder why they ever bothered to
create GPS - surely IDEs aren't their core business?

The one big advantage over Eclipse is start-up time though, but when
you're developing software professionally (in my experience) you often
just have the IDE open permanently anyway!

>This discussion makes me want to wait Just a Little Longer :).

I have to say that Gnatbench looks promising, it's about time there
was an industrial strength Ada IDE for Eclipse, but I just can't
understand why I have this significant issue with it.